Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
. . .And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming.
Melanie Joly grovels in China while terrorism goes unprosecuted in Canada.
This is Sunday’s newsletter coming in late, with some fast breaking additions. I had to work over the weekend and I’d already had a weirdly busy few days since the last Real Story edition, the one that followed the attempted assassination of Donald Trump: We interrupt your regular newsletter. . .
That newsletter was a companion piece to this, in the National Post: Maybe Joe Biden should stop saying Trump will destroy democracy Since then, there have been further developments which may augur what you could call the Second Coming of Trump, which required my attention to this Post assignment: This is not the party of Reagan anymore. It's the party of Trump - but don't trust the Democratic press to accurately explain what's going on.
And that Post piece was followed by this one, online today: Mélanie Joly can't wait to make up with China's dictators. It follows from our foreign affairs minister being summoned to Beijing last Friday to take instruction from her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.
The only thing stopping what she calls a “formal reset” of relations, Joly inadvertently admits to the Globe’s Fife and Chase, is the righteous disgust of ordinary Canadians. “It’s not the government,” said Joly, a protegee of Jean Chretien, Beijing’s senior statesman-comprador in Canada. “It’s more Canadian perceptions toward China. . .”
It’s not like Joly’s government hasn’t tried to change our minds in Beijing’s favour. Back in 2017, Ottawa expended enormous resources in a complex, two-year effort to bring Canadians around and make us all warm and fuzzy about Xi Jinping’s torture state. I reported all the details back then in Here’s how the prime minister is ramming China down our throats.
In today’s Post, I point out that Joly is proposing to turn the Canada-China clock all the way back to 2016, when Wang Yi famously berated and lectured reporters in a long harangue about impudent questions we were not allowed to ask about how the Trudeau government proposed to press its alleged concerns about Beijing’s judicial abductions and its civil rights tramplings and trade-rule breaking and so on.
Despite its efforts, Team Trudeau could not help China win any hearts and minds back then, it turned out. Which is one of the reasons I love my country.
But it’s still all part of one big unhappy story.
Just whose side are we on again?
A curious thing about Joly’s assessment of China’s foreign policy: Apparently Ottawa is of the same view in the matter of the Gaza War. Or rather, Canada and China share the same approach to the catastrophe: “China and Canada and many other countries, the vast majority of the world, I must say, agree that we need a ceasefire, that hostages need to be back, and that there’s a humanitarian catastrophe happening in Gaza.”
Whatever you might make of that, you might want to recall whos paying for all the terror. Whether it’s the drones falling from the skies above Ukraine or the missiles launched almost daily into Israel from Hezbollahland in Lebanon or the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad “resistance” in their vast catacombs beneath the streets of Gaza, the fulcrum is the Quds Force of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). And the money behind it all is Chinese.
Only two weeks ago, NATO rededicated itself to the work of combating Beijing’s “coercive tactics & efforts to divide the Alliance." Either Joly doesn’t know that this is exactly what Wang Yi was up to last Friday in Beijing, or she doesn’t care.
In Canada, you can violate terrorism laws with impunity. Why?
Now to a podcast from my conversation with the former CSIS analyst Phil Gurski: The anger over First Nations treatment in Canada has led to acts of violence no one seems to care about. What this has got to do with synagogues getting smashed up or “anti-Zionist” incitement might elude you at first.
Phil suggests that the waves of church arsons across the country since 2021 should be understood in the context of hate crime and terrorism. Both of us are fascinated by the question: Why doesn’t Ottawa see it that way?
Today’s RCMP brass is more concerned with thoughtcrime and the crime of debunking folklore. See this recent newsletter under the heading And now to whatever the hell the RCMP is thinking, and Chris Selley’s piece in the National Post, Why are police stigmatizing factual reporting about residential school graves?
So far unreported about that just-released RCMP “Environmental Scan” is that the Mounties also seem to have been suckered by an urban legend that has arisen from contradictory claims first made five years ago by a certain Barbara Perry, Director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University.
The evidence-free story is that 300 far-right “hate groups” have popped up in Canada in recent years. For all about that, see Jonathan Kay at the National Post: If there really are 300 neo-Nazi groups in Canada, why can't anyone name them?
In the podcast, Phil and I also spent some time talking about the recent news uproar related to the tragedy of Afghanistan, which was exceedingly difficult for me to discuss without my voice cracking.
But back to the matter at hand.
Phil now heads up the Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting group. He’s authored six books on terrorism, and owing to Phil’s expertise in Islamist terrorism we share many common concerns. We also share the view that the Trudeau government is disturbingly incoherent and inconsistent in its treatment of extremism and hate crimes, and is weirdly reluctant to prosecute offences under the Criminal Code provisions regarding Islamist and “anti-Zionist” terrorism. So do have a listen.
This is a big deal.
I have no particular backstory on the apparent suicide-by-cop event involving the Canadian Zachariah Adam Quraishi at Netiv Ha’asara in Israel. Iddo Moed, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, said the Quraishi’s “Free Palestine” knife attack should serve as a wake-up call about homegrown anti-Israel fanaticism in Canada.
Subscribers will remember that a few weeks ago, Ambassador Moed raised exactly the same alarm, as did the former RCMP counterterrorism investigator John Mecher.
Mecher told me it may be only a matter of time before Hamas and its Canadian supporters spawn a new generation of homegrown terrorists. According to Mecher, the current fashion in “pro-Palestine” activism presents a far greater risk of recruitment to violent extremism and terrorism than was present in the radical activist milieu following 9/11.
“Back then, you simply did not see people running through the streets saying, I’m an al-Qaida supporter, I love bin Laden,” Mecher told me. Well, you sure see a lot of that nowadays.
Since October 7, public displays of true-believer fanaticism of the Al Qaida variety have become completely commonplace in Canada.
It’s everywhere, all the time.